Obama’s Letters of No Apology

Should Barack Obama’s volunteers mail “Letters of No Apology” to survivors of the large number of people killed by U.S. imperial assault in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Recently Obama was asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley if “there’s anything that’s happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?” Obama responded by saying, “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn’t keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards.” The United States, Obama told Crowley, “remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world.”Transcript of Obama Interview on CNN” (July 25, 2008), The Page. Regarding “force for good”: never mind that the hyper-consumerist automobile-addicted U.S. is home to 5 percent of world’s population but generates a quarter of the planet’s climate-baking carbon emissions. Forget the brazenly imperial 720-plus U.S. military bases that are stationed in nearly country on Earth, the threat and recurrent reality of U.S. military assault, the U.S.-spread mass culture of commodified nothingness, and the dedicated U.S. advance of a negative (corporate) globalization model that consigns billions to extreme poverty while the ever richer planetary Few enjoy spectacular opulence (and related political hyper-power) and you begin to get a sense of why many world citizens might think “America is part of what has gone wrong in the world.”

“SHOT AS THEY RAN”

I would like the Afghan “war”It is getting tiresome to hear Obama repeatedly refer to the United States as living “in a time of war.” The U.S. is engaged in one-sided imperial violence against Iraq and Afghanistan. The “force for good” is “waging a colonial war” (Zbigniew Bzrezinski) on relatively defenseless others in distant imperial hinterlands. Ordinary Americans are not living through “wartime conditions” and are in fact being encouraged to stay soft, consumerist, spectator-ized, and demobilized, though a relatively small and disproportionately working-class segment of the U.S. populace is enlisted into the hard culture of militarism (the U.S. power elite having learned from Vietnam not to involve the general populace in ugly colonial campaigns abroad). For some useful reflections, see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and (on class, Vietnam, and military recruitment) Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan, 2005), pp. 133-134. enthusiastFor some interesting details from the primary campaign trail, see Paul Street, “Obama’s Good and ‘Proper’ War,” ZNet (March 5, 2008). Barack Obama to write a Letter of No Apology to Orifa Ahmed. On October 7, 2001, Orifa’s house in the Afghan village of Bibi Mahru was destroyed by a 500-pound bomb dropped by an American F-16 plane. The explosion killed her husband (a carpet weaver), six of her children and two children, who lived (and died) next door. Away visiting relatives when the bombing occurred, Orifa returned to find pieces of her children’s flesh scattered around the killing site. She received $400 from U.S. authorities to compensate her for her losses.John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007), pp. 284-85.

I would also like Obama to write a “Letter of No Apology” to Gulam Rasul, a school headmaster in the Afghan town of Khair Khana. On the morning of October 21, 2001, the United States dropped a 500-pound bomb on his house, killing his wife, three of his sons, his sister and her husband, his brother, and his sister-in-law.Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp.285-86.

Another “Letter of Apology” should go to Sher Kahn, an old man who lost seven relatives when the United States assaulted the Afghan village of Niazi Qala on December 29, 2001. Here is how the British author and filmmaker John Pilger describes the attack:

The roar of the planes had started at three in the morning, long after everybody had retired for the night. Then the bombs began to fall — 500-pounders leading the way, scooping out the earth and felling a row of houses. According to neighbors watching from a distance, the planes flew three sorties over the village and a helicopter hovered close to the ground, firing flares, then rockets. Women and children were seen running from the houses towards a dried pond, perhaps in search of protection from the gunfire, but were shot as they ran.Pilger, Freedom Next Time, p. 286.

“Letters of No Apology” should also go from the “antiwar” Obama campaign to survivors of:

  • 35 Afghan refugees who were bombed by the U.S. for riding in a bus in flight from U.S. assault.
  • 160 Afghanis killed in repeated U.S. bombings of the village of Karam.
  • 93 people killed when U.S. Ac 130 gun-ships strafed the small farming village Chowkar-Karaz. (The Pentagon said the community was “supporting terrorists” and therefore deserved its fate: “those people are dead,” a Pentagon spokesman told reporters, “because we wanted them dead.”)
  • Rampant U.S. torture of civilians and non-combatants employed as part of the “war on terror” at the Bagram military base, near Kabul, since the fall of 2001.
  • 64 civilians killed when the U.S. bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan in early July of this year (This was the fourth wedding party blown up by the U.S.-led “coalition” since the fall of 2001).
  • 19 women who died in the gynecology wing of a Kabul hospital bombed by the U.S. in October of 2001.
  • The countless other U.S. attacks on Afghan villages that have added to a civilian death toll that certainly goes well into the thousands since the U.S. initiated its “liberation” of Afghanistan from a Taliban government the U.S. largely put into place during the 1990s.Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 287-293; John Pilger, “Obama, The Prince of Bait and Switch,” The New Statesman, July 26, 2008. For details on sources on hundreds of U.S. and related “coalition” and Northern Alliance attacks leading to many civilian deaths between the fall of 2001 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, “Daily Casualty Account of Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S. Bombing and Special Forces Attack, October 7 [2001] Until Present Day” (March 15, 2003).

The people of Afghanistan can be forgiven for thinking it might not be all bad if Uncle Sam has occasionally taken his eye off “the ball in Afghanistan.”

U.S.-“liberated” Afghanistan remains desperately poor and violence-plagued under the control of religious extremists, warlords and the deadly U.S. Empire. Women are less safe there now than under the Taliban.Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 264-293.

“AS ILLEGAL AS THE INVASON OF IRAQ”

For what it’s worth, prominent legal scholar Marjorie Cohn notes that “the invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq.” As Cohn explains:

“The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.”

“The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not ‘armed attacks’ by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’ This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.”Marjorie Cohn, “End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan,” ZNet (July 30, 2008).

Sold as a legitimate defensive response to the jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken without definitive proof or knowledge that that country’s largely U.S.-created Taliban government was responsible in any way for 9/11. It occurred after the Bush administration rebuffed efforts by that government to possibly extradite accused 9/11 planners to stand trial in the U.S. The U.S. sought to destroy the Taliban government with no legal claim to introduce regime change in another sovereign state. The invasion took place over the protest of numerous Afghan opposition leaders and in defiance of aid organizations who expected a U.S. attack to produce a humanitarian catastrophe. And, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2003, U.S. claims to possess the right to bomb Afghanistan — an action certain to produce significant casualties — raised the interesting question of whether Cuba and Nicaragua were entitled to set off bombs in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S. provided shelter to well-known terrorists shown to have conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban and Nicaraguan people and governments.Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206. See also Rajul Mahajan, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terror (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), p. 21. Under Bush’s rationale for launching his assault on Afghanistan (an attack that Obama wishes to significantly expand), citizens of Latin American states whose dictatorships were schooled in torture at the School of the Americas (Ft. Benning, Georgia) would be free to attack American cities and villages.

“IRAQ HAS BEEN KILLED”

As for the U.S. “mistake” in Iraq, where to begin with the Letters of No Apology that Obama and his staff need to write? The U.S. has undertaken a highly criminal occupation of that country against the wishes of the “liberated” nation’s own populace. In a marvelous example of what Obama called (in Berlin last week) U.S. “sacrifice” for “freedom,”Remarks of Barack Obama: “A World That Stands As One,” Berlin, Germany (July 24, 2008). the U.S. has inflicted a bloody Holocaust on Mesopotamia, killing (directly and indirectly) as many as 1.2 million Iraqis and maiming and displacing many millions more. According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen last December, “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”Nir Rosen, “The Death of Iraq,” Current History (December 2007), p. 31.

I wonder what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment offered by Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state’s Democratic primary: “It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together.”WIFR Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois, “Obama Speaks at General Motors in Janesville,” February 13, 2008.

“We should support the millions of Iraqis,” Obama told 200,000 rapt listeners in Berlin, “who seek to rebuild their lives even as we pass on responsibility to the Iraqi government.”Obama, “A World That Stands As One.”

“Rebuild their lives” from exactly what, pray tell? Senator Obama did not elaborate on the two U.S. military attacks, the decade plus of murderous “economic sanctions” (which killed more than half a million children — a cost that the current Obama advisor and supporter Madeline Albright called a “price worth paying”), and the ongoing invasion’s ever-climbing death toll. Obama will continue the occupation as president, something known by those who care to read between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign rhetoric.

Reading Obama’s line about “freedom”-loving America’s overseas “sacrifice” in his Berlin Address, I was reminded of something he said in a speech to The Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in alleged support of the Iraq “war” – P.S.]. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.Barack Obama, “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006).

This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for colossal U.S. war atrocity — the crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city — by the U.S. military in April and November of 2004. The town was designated for destruction as an example of the awesome state terror promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of American imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It was a deeply provocative and insulting place to choose to highlight American “sacrifice” and “resolve” in the brazenly imperialist occupation — described as “a colonial war” by the grand U.S. imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski (an Obama foreign policy advisor) — of Iraq.Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Five Problems With the President’s Plan,” Washington Post (January 12, 2007). On Fallujah, see Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2005, p. xii; Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 27-28; Paul Street, “Vilsacking Iraq,” ZNet Magazine (December 22, 2006).

Recycling the imperial discourse of elite Democratic “doves” during and on the Vietnam War,Noam Chomsky, “‘Good News’: Iraq and Beyond,” ZNet (February 16, 20088); Noam Chomsky, “The Mechanisms and Practices of Indoctrination” (1984), pp.207-208 in Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. C.P. Otero (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003). Obama insists that the monumentally illegal and transparently petro-colonial occupation of Iraq was a “strategic blunder” resulting from “our” over-zealous “good intentions” (sometimes we just get a little crazy with our noble passion to spread liberty).

Not true: Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) is an imperial CRIME (aggressive warfare was the top crime for which Nazi leaders were executed at Nuremburg) obviously dedicated to deepening U.S. control over hyper-strategic oil resources in the world’s energy heartland while serving the ongoing interests of the American military-industrial complex.For details and sources, see Paul Street, “Largely About Oil: Reflections on Empire, Petroleum, Democracy, and the Occupation of Iraq,” Z Magazine (January 2008): 38-42.

Barack No Apology (Because We Are Good) Obama wants badly to expand what he calls George W. Bush’s “good” and “proper” war on Afghanistan while claiming to want to reduce America’s “mistake[n]” presence in Iraq.

The world should beware. Superpower may be getting ready to take on some outwardly new faces, but its dangerous national narcissism will live on along with its empire of bases, bullets, and bombs.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian and independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa City, IA. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 2005); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefied 2007). Street's new book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics can now be ordered. Read other articles by Paul.

17 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. kimberly said on August 9th, 2008 at 6:56am #

    As deep and touching this piece is, we can’t blame Obama for everything going wrong in Irak and Afghanistan. I lost my husband in Afghanistan and I lost a son in Irak. I have another son still in Afghanistan.

    I refuse to let an article like this take away from my husband and my sons. I refuse to let you diminish the courage and caring they had and have in the belief that they are protecting those people.

    An apology is nothing compared to the lives of all involved in this terrible, awful mistake of a war declared by Bush. I’ll stop now before I say things I will not regret.

    Kimberly.

  2. rosemarie jackowski said on August 9th, 2008 at 1:47pm #

    Good article.
    The US should pay reparations to the Native Americans, Descendants of slaves, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Japan, and all of the other nations we have invaded, bombed, and/or exploited. The list is a long one.
    When the taxpayers have to pay a ‘reparations tax’ we will come up with a foreign policy that is a lot different from the one that we have had for many decades.

  3. Deadbeat said on August 9th, 2008 at 4:17pm #

    Should Barack Obama’s volunteers mail “Letters of No Apology” to survivors of the large number of people killed by U.S. imperial assault in Iraq and Afghanistan?

    Good question to ask Cynthia McKinney’s volunteers as well. Obama didn’t vote for the War in Afghanistan. McKinney did.

  4. rjones2818 said on August 9th, 2008 at 4:38pm #

    Good question to ask Cynthia McKinney’s volunteers as well. Obama didn’t vote for the War in Afghanistan. McKinney did.

    And yet, he’s voted for funding for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars every time except last Octoberish (due to him wanting to fool progressives into thinking he’s not an imperialist).

    Truth be told, pretty much everyone in this country has contributed toward the debacle we’re faced with today. I like the idea of a reparations tax.

  5. rosemarie jackowski said on August 9th, 2008 at 4:47pm #

    Deadbeat…Yes, we all should be sending letters of apology to all of the victims. We are all complicit.

    Reparations paid for by taxpayers, YES. I have been saying that for years. Click this.
    https://new.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Jackowski15.htm

  6. Deadbeat said on August 9th, 2008 at 5:49pm #

    To rjones2818,

    The point of my response is not to absolve Obama of any responsibility however Paul Street poses selective blame not on Obama but on Obama supporters who are ordinary citizens who didn’t have the power to vote or not to vote on the war. However Cynthia McKinney who is running as the standard bearer for the Green Party DID vote for the War on Afghanistan. Only Barbara Lee voted against that resolution. Once the war starts it is politically harder to vote against funding unless you want to get tarred for “abandoning” the troops. That is the political reality that Paul Street misses in his opening sentence.

    That kind of rhetoric is ridiculous and Streets deserves to called upon such reckless and callous rhetoric. It won’t win converts.

    To Ms. Jackowski

    Deadbeat…Yes, we all should be sending letters of apology to all of the victims. We are all complicit.

    I disagree with the “We are all complicit” rhetoric. I as well as many other activists participated in activity to STOP both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States owes the people of Afghanistan and Iraq reparations. Neither the government of Afghanistan nor her citizens was responsible for 9-11 as 9-11 was a criminal act and not an act of war and is a law enforcement matter.

    The Left is complicit in diffusing the anti-war movement and misleading the public that the War on Iraq is about Oil. Are the people who tried to prevent the War in Iraq “complicit” as say Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein who have used their celebrity to mislead the public about the reasons for the War. Therefore, I don’t agree with you on “complicity” question.

    We all should be ashamed as what the U.S. stands for and represents but this “blaming the victim” will not win converts.

  7. Hue Longer said on August 10th, 2008 at 2:04am #

    Deadbeat,

    “reckless and callous”? You aren’t serious are you? What exactly should his opening sentence have looked like?

    ( You used rhetoric two times in one sentence and three times in the span of 5 sentences…that’s awesome!)

  8. paul street said on August 10th, 2008 at 7:44am #

    “As deep and touching this piece is, we can’t blame Obama for everything going wrong in Irak and Afghanistan.”

    This article simply doesn’t “blame Obama for everything going wrong in Irak and Afghanistan” and it is absurd to say or suggest that it does.

    “I refuse to let an article like this take away from my husband and my sons. I refuse to let you diminish the courage and caring they had and have in the belief that they are protecting those people.”

    Should a European journalist in 1939 have thought twice about telling the truth about what the Third Reich did when it invaded Poland because of the fear that it might “take away” from the pride of German soliders in Hitler’s Army? Should a historian be inhibited about telling to the truth about what the U.S. did to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s becase it might hurt the self-esteem of some Vietnam veterans and/or their families? The totalitarian “history down the memory whole” implications of this guilt trip are pretty clear

    Deadbeat is off base. I simply ask a sort of ironic and rhetorical question about Obama’s supporters: should they now draft letters of no apology in accord with the offensive statements of their candidate? To say that I am selectively blaming them for the invasion of Afghanistan is childish hyperbole. Deadbeat should be ashamed of that sort of nonsense.

    I made no assertions about McKinney (good or bad) and any notion that her vote on Afghanistan somehow invalidates any part of my argument here is absurd.

    The imperial Iraq War is about many things, including oil (as is well known to anyone with the slightest knowledge of U.S. foreign relations and geo-strategic realities that are not new) .

    Obama was in the Illinois legislature when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan but we have every reason to think he would have totally supported that attack if had been a U.S. Senator in 2001. His 2002 speech against Iraq War preparations had no language suggesting that he thought the Afghanistan operation was a “dumb war” (the kind he opposed).

  9. Barbara S said on August 10th, 2008 at 8:43am #

    Sadly, I must admit to having been so focused on the Iraq debacle, that I did not fully educate myself to the events and atrocities that were taking place in Afghanistan. I erroneously saw Afghanistan as justified, based on the information that we were fed stating that Bin Laden and al Qeada were based there and functioning from within that country.

    I have heard similar stories of atrocities from soldiers returning from Iraq, about the needless murder of children and women and the haunting odor of burning flesh that filled the streets in Iraqi provinces as they patrolled.

    I have been appalled at how much the media and government have hidden from the eyes of our citizens … and yet we are all Americans, sharing the labels of tyrant, murderer and occupiers, simply because we live in a country whos leaders have chosen to perpetrate these acts of aggression.

    It sickens me to realize how naive and tunnel visioned my thinking has been, while focusing solely on the wrongs of our invasion of Iraq. I suppose I naively envisioned ground troops searching and seeking out the “enemy” and did not realize the massive air strikes and random “blanket” killing that has taken place in Afghanistan, in addition to Iraq.

    How can we be so matter of fact and unapologetic for killing woman and children, for destroying entire families, villages, wedding parties … and having done so repeatedly and without even the appearance of empathy?

    America owes many apologies, even though a mere apology would seems to greatly minimize what we have done! The victims of this aggression, both foreign and domestic , our brave soldiers and their families, changed and damaged forever … ALL deserve an apology from this government and the “decider!”

  10. rosemarie jackowski said on August 10th, 2008 at 11:01am #

    Deadbeat…I still say ‘We are all complicit’ – even those of us who engaged in activities to stop the war. Obviously, we did not do enough. What we did was less than useless – and all the while we continued to live in the US and participate in the war economy. Every time we purchased a pair of socks or a loaf of bread we supported the economy of war. In addition, most of us continued to pay taxes. How immoral is that?

    We did, and continue to do, only the things that the government allows. Meanwhile innocent civilians are being slaughtered and a sovereign nation is under occupation. We will go down in history as a generation of losers, lemmings being led to the slaughter to watch others die while we continue to vote for repbs/dems. I find it shocking that in the whole USA, not one State Attorney General or county Prosecutor has come forward to indict Bush/Cheney – even more shocking is the lack of interest in justice on the part of the population. I guess that Prosecution of the war criminals will be cancelled due to lack of interest.

  11. Max Shields said on August 10th, 2008 at 3:19pm #

    Mr. Steet it is clear who is making it his position to up the ante in Afghanistan, consider Pakistan and Iran on the table for military “spankings” by Uncle Sam if they don’t shape up. You have made a clear statement about a presidential candidate who pretended to be an “anti-war” candidate (really it was quite clear he wasn’t) and now makes war talk; and says he WON’T apologize for the killing in either country.

    The only ones who don’t see exactly what’s going on are those with another agenda.

  12. Andrew said on August 10th, 2008 at 8:44pm #

    The US should pay reparations to the Native Americans, Descendants of slaves, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Japan, and all of the other nations we have invaded, bombed, and/or exploited. The list is a long one.
    When the taxpayers have to pay a ‘reparations tax’ we will come up with a foreign policy that is a lot different from the one that we have had for many decades.

    That is absolutely absurd! More taxes, what awash and to think after reading a great article I come across this comment to lower my spirits.

  13. peter hindrup said on August 11th, 2008 at 8:10pm #

    kimberly said ‘I refuse to let an article like this take away from my husband and my sons. I refuse to let you diminish the courage and caring they had and have in the belief that they are protecting those people.’
    Only if they were wilfully blind, or stupid.

    All the countries that took part in the invasion ought to be up for reparation, US, UK, Georgia (Ironical: Georgians are crying about being bombed by Russia, what goes around, comes around!) and their leaders charged I war crimes.

  14. Riaz Haq said on August 15th, 2008 at 4:33pm #

    Until recently, I have been a strong supporter of Mr. Obama’s campaign to be president. I have a strong desire to see a black man become president in my lifetime and open up opportunities for more people of color and women in these United States. My support has been based on his message of change after many years of war in Iraq and economic decline in the United States. However, as Mr. Obama begins to articulate his positions on issues, I am having second thoughts. I do not want to help elect another warmonger whose only change would be the change in the war venue. And this change in venue could be far more disastrous than the situation under current President George W. Bush or potential situation under a future President John McCain, who are both known entities with plenty of foreign policy and national security experience.

    I invite you to read more about opinion of Obama at: http://www.riazhaq.com/search?q=obama

  15. Al said on August 21st, 2008 at 7:50am #

    People deserve to lose their halos over this: particularly Air Force personnel, the entire US government, all US diplomats, the war supporting “free press”, EVERY single soldier that followed orders in this episode of mass murder, along with everyone who voted for a democrat or a republican in the last thirty years. How is dropping 500, to 2,000 pound bombs on people “protecting” them? Blowing people to bloody rags isn’t protecting them? Have you ever been in combat and felt what a 500 pound bomb feels like when it goes off? It feels like a freight train has just gone through you. The blast will destroy your internal organs and shred the clothing right off your body. These are the bombs we drop on cities with such great accuracy. The people who support this war are filth, walking filth undeserving of sympathy, pity or mercy. We even shut down Iraq’s orphanages, putting untold numbers of children into the street to be exploited and abused. You war supporters didn’t do this because you are stupid, no you did it because you are straight out nasty rotten murderers. I will never forget how the liberals and conservatives around me became vicious mass killers while acting like slimy hypocritical scum talking about democracy and values. Many of us will never forget you or forgive you. War supporters in this country have long ago crossed the rubicon and have sowed a division in US society that will never heal. This endless war is just the violence of a declining Washington superpower seeking to drag the whole world down with them. The DC government armed and invented the Taliban, the FBI invented Al Qaeda so it could prosecute Bin Laden in absentia under federal RICO statutes over the first WTC bombing attempt. It was Bin Laden that took advantage of our arrogant blustering thinking that you can just go out with a lasso and round up the bad guys, the DC regime literally dropped a ready made “movement” into Bin Laden’s lap. Any patriot wants to show me I’m wrong is welcome to fight me. I’m done treating pro-war scum like human beings.

  16. Dwight said on April 17th, 2009 at 9:36am #

    This article demonstrates why America is weak and disrespected around the world. We have meely mouthed activists who claim to be committed to life and freedom but fail to see the evil that exists, not from “American Imperialism” as it is commonly referred, but from Islamic Extremists, tyrannical dictators and common murderous warlords.

    Case in point, to state that women were safer under the Taliban than today in Afghanistan, wow. that shows the extent of both stupidity and naivete. Women were never safe under the Taliban. They were victimized, terrorized, tortured, maimed, mutilated, and murdered for the slightest infractions of sharia law.

    America is not perfect. War is not without civilian loss, even for the most noble causes. Yes, I am sorry for the civilian losses, but we are waging this war to prevent similar atrocities of 9/11 from ever happening again. There were innocent people killed that day also but I don’t see any letters of apology being suggested to those victim’s families.

  17. bozh said on April 17th, 2009 at 11:06am #

    dwight,
    i am one of those activists who rigourously opposes islam or the parts of it that misteach. I also despise most sharia ‘laws’ or, rather, imposition of male will on females.

    however, taliban cruelty/terror does not even approach US cruelty/terror (against darkies/aliens, mostly) let alone equals or exceedes it as you may or may not tacitly aver.

    US is by far more murderous nation since 16th century than most other evil empires and lands. tnx